When the Australian automotive age was cranking up – when at least one in four households in the country owned a car – a Melbourne businessman decided that Fords, manufactured in Geelong since 1928, needed a really nice showroom.
Car dealer Leonard Fenton secured a corner site at the broad end of Elizabeth Street, in a neighbourhood where machines reliant on mechanical horsepower had replaced horse and cartage businesses.
Fenton commissioned a fashionable Melbourne architect of the late deco age, Harry Norris, to design a flash-looking outlet. With curved class windows and three storeys of streamline moderne style, from the moment it opened in 1937 until it closed in 1990, the Melford dealership served the city in some style.
In fact, Melford, (a portmanteau of Melbourne Ford), became one of the world’s leading Ford dealerships and was described by The Argus as “the finest car showroom in the Commonwealth”.
In 2015, this beautiful showroom, with a display turntable still in situ in the curved corner window, resumed operation as a car retailer, this time for Toyota.
But today, having undergone a fastidious, heritage-guided restoration by Gray Puksand Architecture, Harry Norris’ lovely building, along with two other later car-associated vintage structures on the same block, has become the foreground of a new office with a very 21st-century purpose.
The first part of a massive $1 billion project that will progressively transform this part of the Melbourne CBD into a biomedical and research annexe of the nearby Royal Melbourne Hospital, a contemporary, highly glazed, six-level office building has been inserted into the middle of the complex of restored structures.
Architect Robert Puksand says the $90 million building – that has added 20,000 square metres of additional space to the site – acknowledges Norris’ deco language in the corner curvatures and strong horizontal lines that are carried through into lighting features.
Those curves, he says, also help the new element to be recessive. “We tried to make it sit into the site,” he says. “While the city has to evolve, the decent setback meant that the old and the new can exist in harmony.”
Puksand says it is “a strong building that in its moderne style was, in some respects, all about the automobile and the experience of speed, freedom and the new”, and goes even further by calling it “a heroic building, particularly in the way it uses that corner”.
While the refurbishment uncovered and reinstituted some original features such as surface tiles, there is a lot about the “challenging project” that is unseen. A new three-level basement was inserted, and required the original roofing to be deconstructed and then put back. The whole structure also had to be made to withstand earth tremors.
“These [existing] buildings weren’t designed to be earthquake-proof but that’s now in the building code,” Puksand says.
In the story of these buildings, there was a pivotal moment in 2012 when a demolition application was made to remove them and potentially turn the site over to residential development. But with backing from the vociferous Melbourne Art Deco and Modernism Society they were saved and, like so much of Norris’ other marvellous work, were given a heritage listing as being of state significance.
Even so, Melbourne has developed a habit of being rather rough-handed in the way it treats its listed buildings, which has resulted in many wonderful city heritage structures being tacitly preserved but only as incidental facades to much bigger modern developments.
Down on the corner of Queensberry and Elizabeth streets, Gray Puksand and developers PDG have avoided the usual “facadism” result by pushing the new offices far back from the important corner so that it retains breathing space. It means, Puksand says, “that the Norris buildings remain intact, and the iteration of space [from the street front] is not all that different to how it was set up originally”.
More than bringing back to life “what had been unappreciated, unloved industrial buildings”, Puksand says it’s just as wonderful that the main retail building “has maintained its complete functionality for 21st-century automotive use”.
“The showroom and the maintenance workshops are still operating,” he says. “Who would have thought?”
Indeed. He can imagine a day in the near future when a site that started out showcasing racy 1936 and 1937 Ford V8s and coupes could one day be selling electric cars.